Deference to Paper: Textuality, Materiality, and Literary Digital Humanities in Africa

This article explores the relationship between the forms of representation and the modes of production of African online writing, rendering visible an appreciation of the digital contexts that have occasioned new experimentations with regard to genre, style and the formation of digital publics. But it’s the bibliographic form and materiality of African digital texts that interest me the most. The medium of African literature, profoundly transformed since the arrival of the Internet, conditions the transmission, reception of meaning and the constitution of reading publics and the identity of audiences. More so, the new textual environment of African writing and creatives expressions such as digital networks and literary blogs are terrains of discursive contestations that activate these digital fields of cultural production in Africa as materially connected to prior literary forms. Deploying several examples, including the recent ‘transition’ of Saraba Magazine to print and Mike Maphoto’s Diary of a Zulu Girl, I argue that, despite the widespread uses of digital media forms in new African narratives, there is a lingering print imaginary in the digital articulations of African literary texts. While this tension between print and digital forms shapes textual meanings, it signals new directions in African literary studies more broadly. Resume Cet article explore la relation entre les formes de representation et les modes de production de l’ecriture africaine en ligne, en rendant visible une appreciation des contextes numeriques qui facilitent de nouvelles experimentations en ce qui concerne le genre, le style et la formation des publics numeriques. C’est pourtant la forme bibliographique et la materialite des textes africains numeriques qui m’interessent le plus. Le media de litterature africaine, profondement transforme depuis l’arrivee de l’Internet, conditionne similairement la transmission, la reception de la signification ainsi que la composition de publics de lecteurs et l’identite d’audiences. En outre, le nouvel environnement textuel de l’ecriture africaine et les expressions creatives, tels que les reseaux numeriques et les blogs litteraires, sont des terrains de contestations discursives qui stimulent ces domaines numeriques de production culturelle en Afrique, lies materiellement a d’anciennes formes litteraires. En me servant des exemples de la « transition » recente vers la presse ecrite de la Saraba Magazine et le Journal d’une fille Zulu par Nkululeko Maphoto, j’argumente que, malgre les usages repandus des formes numeriques de media dans de nouvelles narrations africaines, il existe une anxiete persistante imaginaire ou archiviste dans les articulations numeriques de textes litteraires africains. Pendant que cette tension entre les formes imprimees et numeriques faconnent les sens textuels, cela indique plus generalement de nouvelles directions dans les etudes litteraires africaines. Mots-cles: Materialite; litterature africaine; medias numeriques; Textualite; ecriture imprimee


Introduction
Few studies on postcolonial African literary productions online have focused on the digital environments and materialities of many born-digital literary texts by African writers. For scholarly works that present critical analyses of these important domains, the emphasis is more on content than on the form and physical features of the medium of expression. Ideas from bibliographic and textual criticism can be beneficial to studies of the African digital literary spaces that produce multiple textual forms, and which remain strongly linked to print culture. I use "textual criticism" not as a synonym for "literary criticism," but in the sense of Thomas Tanselle (1990) who in "Textual Criticism and Deconstruction" writes of the ambiguity that emerges when both are used interchangeably. For him, "textual criticism" has traditionally meant the scholarly activity of studying the textual histories of verbal works in an effort to propose reliable texts of those works according to one or another definition of correctness. As I will show throughout this paper, my interest is not to focus on a single digital text or the remediated form of a print text for my analysis; the point is to use several examples which signal the material implications of an enduring print consciousness permeating African digital spaces. It is thus imperative to begin a conversation on new works that exist purely through the medium of the web, texts whose ontology is shaped by digitality and that later appear as printed texts. As the Internet is increasingly central for the circulation of African creative Yeku: Deference to Paper Art. 15, page 3 of 27 expressions in Web 2.0 spaces like literary blogs and social media, we need to explore connections between the material form of these spaces and the variations of the texts produced.
In her work on the emergence of digital literary studies, Amy Earhart writes that a unique approach of the digital humanities is the decentering of print scholarship which is "beginning to wield less power in shaping the area as blog posts, tweets, listserv discussions, and digital projects gain attention" (2015,6). While a similar situation may be found in digital literary studies in Africa, print culture lingers as a solidified aspiration of digital literary writers who mostly encounter the digital as an experimental space for their creativity. If as Karin Barber suggests, "literature is a social product and bears the imprint of the conditions of its production" (2007,432), we can seek to understand the ways in which digital technologies shape the Structured around social media as a meta-fictional space from which her protagonist, Ifemelu expresses grim perspectives about race, the novel demonstrates a range of textualities that highlight how print and digital poetics actually converge, rather than displace each other in contemporary works from the continent. New platforms of African writing not only assure the visibility of new names, but also accommodate novel forms of authorial agency that enriches African cultural productions more generally.
Theoretically, the field of African digital literary studies itself is responding to this digital explosion of literary agency, with an increased engagement with the Internet as the medium of new literary voices. Shola Adenekan's 2012 inaugurating dissertation in the area frames this process as "the Internetting of African literature" (11) and is the basis for his forthcoming monograph on African literature in a digital age. The new volume addresses class and sexual politics in online writing from Kenya and Nigeria and provides an analysis of digital literary networks and their importance to the understanding of literary history in both countries (Adenekan 2021). In the 2012 study, Adenekan argues that the platformization of literary craft in the Kenyan and Nigerian literary contexts arguably started from the mid to late 1990s when writers seeking to draw attention to their printed work started posting poems and short stories on e-mailing lists, such as Krazitivity and Ederi, and other similar listservs hosted by the likes of Yahoo and the now defunct Geocities. In more recent years, newer online spaces, such as Brittlepaper and Africaisacountry have appeared as platforms from which new writers produce literary and cultural discourses on Africa.
In the last ten years, Brittlepaper, in particular, as an Afrocentric space of literary circulations has consolidated its status as the most formidable literary portal into creative writing on the continent.
In line with Adenekan's work, I analyzed an online fan fiction of Chinua Achebe's 1958 novel Things Fall Apart that was published by Brittlepaper in 2017, demonstrating that these digital platforms of African literature have created new roles for readers of African fiction who "recast the monologic frame and individual authority of print," resulting in "a decentered medium, structured on the logics of interactivity and participatory culture" (2017,262). The reading experience is now such that allows people to easily respond to literary texts and even engage directly with other writers themselves, even as new reading habits are formed. My goal in that article was to show that the structure and design of Web 2.0 platforms and applications, such as blogs and social media, democratize and decenter authorial space, opening up more user-focused engagements and reformulations of traditional modes of cultural representations. Around the same time, Zahrah Nesbitt-Ahmed (2017) ' (2018, 187). In a work that is closest to the topic I examine in this article, digital literary forms are asserted as influencing from local, national, and regional zones, with diverse audiences of these online fictional forms drawing from broader African, diasporic, and global audiences.
Also, this theoretical excursion gestures towards the relevance of my present interestthat the close connection of print culture to the digital informs different forms of textualities which mandate an appreciation of bibliographic and textual criticismareas that are undertheorized in African literature more generally. The making of literary texts, in terms of, for example, the archival materials and manuscripts drafts of several pioneering African writers, offers a glimpse of the changes that occur in the process of textual production and circulations. One recent iteration of this materialist approach in African literature is Nathan Suhr-Sytsma's essay "Christopher Okigbo's Materials," a work that investigates the poetics and compositional practice of the Nigerian modernist writer Christopher Okigbo through unpublished drafts is what I set out to explore in this article, particularly in the framework of how ideas in textual and bibliographical criticism intersect with the African writing online.
Some of the ideas expressed here are of course not new, but I do wish to restate what I believe is a lingering print imaginary in the digital articulations of African literary expressions. This is necessary in the framework of African digital studies in which conversations around the text, in either its print or digital iteration, are limited in terms of their materiality and bibliographic form. A print imaginary refers to the ways in which print practices continue to undergird and inform digital expressions of literary agency. This persistence of print is informed by the popular notion that the digital realm is a domain of impermanence and instability. As Katherine Hayles writes, a print-centric perspective in the ways electronic writing and textuality are discussed (Hayles 2005, 37). This is evident among African writers online. I am interested in how these oft-repeated arguments in the digital humanities manifest in the particular contexts of online writing from several African countries. A print consciousness continues to shape the digital expression of works produced via electronic platforms, despite the tendency to romanticize the digital that we see in ideas of Nigerian online literary critic Ikhide Ikheloa. I am suggesting that the mobility from the digital to print is itself something we need to investigate since print in African writing remains pervasive despite our celebratory posture toward the digital.
Because of the vast amount of literary data from blogs and platforms on African content, it is reasonable to assume that currently, the digital is the chief medium of literature. However, considering present realities that show the simultaneous investments in both print and online writing, this may be a tad essentialization of digital media, one that is impervious to the class politics of the digital divide on the continent. According to 2019 data from the ITU, a United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, 3.6 billion people around the world still lacked online access, with Africa as the region with the lowest (28.2 per cent). The ITU data revealed a growing Internet uptake, with 4.1 billion people now online, but also a widening digital gender divide.
While we need to acknowledge the important contributions of literary blogs and platforms that give prominence to previously unrecognize creative voices, we need to avoid fetishizing views on the medium as the new mainly uncontested space of creative writing. That writers use digital media as creative and experimental terrains for rendering visible their creative genius has received attention from others. New African voices online "use this space to overtly attack the 'single story' of African representations outside Africa through the modality of "their Facebook status updates and in much of the online fiction they post on social media networks" (Adenekan and Cousins 2014, 14). While the focus on Saraba Magazine enables me to reflect on this persistence of print, Maphoto's experimentation with his literary blog allows me to examine more fully the ways in which the interactions of both print and digital platforms can structure meanings differently.

Saraba magazine's "deference to paper"
Saraba as a literary magazine published its first online issue in 2009 and has since then aimed to "create unending voices" by publishing the finest emerging writers, with focus on writers from Nigeria, and other parts of Africa. What I undertake in this section is to use an important digital literary space in Africa to make a point about print, rather than use the magazine's foray into print to undermine the platform. A major platform's turn to print proves the point that the digital only serves as a testbed for their literary works that ultimately aspire to print. From the editorial page of its first printed issue, the magazine expresses their commitment to "publish at least one print issue each year," writing that "the idea, as we have done here, is to anthologize new writing, squarely on the premise of promise; as though this is a document with which readers might return to understand how the featured contributors have prospered in their calling as writers" (2017). I am using this Saraba example to make legible the many other literary works that circulate on blogs and social media which, though are born-digital, desire the conditions of print since the digital, as testbed for the imagination, produces writing as an aesthetic of contingency. Contingency manifests as writing emerges through parameters of transience that subject online texts to constant emendations. This is particularly the case as texts evolve because of the multiplicity of those participating in its emergence.
Although this particular Saraba example may seem to be only one instance, there are other similar gestures in Africa's literary communities on the Internet.
For instance, we may think about another platform, African Writing Online which published some of today's most important writers in contemporary African literature long before Web 2.0 became a converging point for cultural productions on the continent. The Nigerian writer Chuma Nwokolo one of the pioneering founders of the platform told me via social media on April 15, 2015 that their platform "was always meant to be hybrid" in the sense that digital works could later be published in print as a strategy of making African Writing Online "more sustainable without depending on grants and the like" from patrons (Nwokolo 2015). Therefore, although it is a foundation platform of African online writing, the magazine has had about five print issues and literary texts from many of its writers have appeared in print. The material differences between online poems by Niyi Osundare or Jack Mapanje and their print iterations deserve more scholarly attention than what we currently have. Saraba indicates that print is still very much entangled with digital environments, thus enabling a richer understanding of the production of texts in a material and bibliographical sense. As Figure 1 indicates, what they call a "deference to paper," which I explore more below, provides a sufficient metaphor for the kind of conversations and analyses on African bibliographical criticism which we need to be having as texts move back-and-forth between print and digital platforms.
We can begin unpacking the implications of this post by Saraba magazine by examining how the editors imagine a reader who dives "into something of beauty" Yeku: Deference to Paper Art. 15, page 9 of 27 as a gross misunderstanding of the act of reading in a digital environment. The language the editors employ invokes the physical affordances of print as a domain the reader dives into. On the other hand, digital reading is an interaction with a screen environment that transforms perception and the acts of comprehension and interpretation. Readers express the cognitive demands of print reading differently in a digital space in which non-linearity, speed reading, and browsing are reading strategies typically employed by digital natives. In the light of their desire to treat "the magazine as an aesthetic object" the editors at Saraba reinforce the idea that digital reading does not offer the kind of stability and permanence associated with reading print. The assumption here is that electronic texts are not as stable as printed works, even if the supposed fixity of print is an idea many scholars including Matthew Kirschenbaum (2002)  ironic, though, that the presentation of content on the Saraba website is carefully designed to render graphic as an aesthetic appeal that contributes to the semiotics of the creative works posted on the online magazine. Put simply, despite the numerous sites, blogs, platforms and data on African online literature, a deference to paper by one of Africa's leading online literary platforms aptly symbolizes the persistence of print in an otherwise saturated digital environment. This is not to suggest that Saraba Magazine is denouncing the digital or that it does not trust the aesthetic abilities of digital technologies. While the editors may not necessarily romanticize the printed version, their transition does suggest the fixation with print that I argue is still largely to be found among some digital actors. Being able to access the printed version in digital format on online publishing platforms like OkadaBooks can also mean that the material complexities of both the printed and the digital versions warrant an exploration of the texts produced from a perspective that recognizes the physical peculiarities of both platforms. another. Like many other recent expressions of African online writing that use the authorial affordances of social media to produce and sustain "networked publics" (Ito 2008), the Diary of a Zulu Girl brings readers and the writer in a shared media space in which the boundaries between author and reader are almost nonexistent.

Diary of a Zulu Girl
Whether it is on Maphoto's blog or on his social media accounts, the medium structures literary meaning and conditions reader behavior and responses. In the seventh chapter of the e-book, which almost appears to reproduce the entry in the original Facebook post, Thandeka the protagonist is made aware of the dialogic space in which she has been constructed when she appears to step outside of her original fictive environment and negotiates some dignity for herself: By the time I went to university I had slept with two guys and yes that sounds sluttish to some but count how many people you have slept with before you judge. If you have more than 5 in five years then I guess we in the same boat (Maphoto 2013).
In this passage, Thandeka Mkhize asks her readers and the potential moral judges of her sexual choices to look at themselves in the mirror before judging her erotic proclivities. Maphoto presents a character that is aware of the readerly gaze of the online reader glued to the screen of a mobile phone or a desktop. Thandeka is rendered conscious of a need for a dialogue with the readers of the story in which she exists and signifies an awareness of the medium in which her subjectivities have been constructed. While both the initial Facebook entries and e-book version have an easyflowing style, the obvious spelling and grammar errors reveal Maphoto's story has not been well edited, indicating the fluidity and mutability of a work whose language is in a perpetual state of flux. Also, as evident in this narration by the protagonist in the seventh chapter of part 1, the original blog entries were riddled with grammatical glitches and stylistic incongruities that are more effectively presented in the print edition: "I was not born poor but I cant say I was born rich either. My parents are both teachers in Mooi River halfway between Johannesburg and Durban…Yes I do not stay in the rural parts of it but its still deeply cultured with rules and traditions that go deep." Aside from the fact that the print edition polishes the linguistic glitches of the digital versions, another major difference is the difference in material and physical properties. As Stephanie Bosch Santana reveals, in general, the success of Maphoto's blog is due to its "exploitation of strategies associated with both the digital and print realms " Employing the anonymity of the online space to gain initial traction for the diary began, Maphoto later revealed his identity, and cast himself in the more traditional role of "author" rather than "blogger" (Santana 2018, 192). What Maphoto's Diary of a Zulu Girl, for instance will attempt to examine how the book differs considerably in its material form from the blog. Such materialist reading of the book as an object that has physical properties which contribute meaning is not common in African literary circles and it is one that I hope the imbrications of print and digital media can facilitate. As Maphoto's online fiction morphs into a printed book, as well as a planned television drama that is still being expected, it forces us to appreciate how a text can change its form and, hence, its meaning, and audience when its medium of expression changes. In Figure 2, we get a sense of the text on both Facebook and Wordpress.

Art. 15, page 15 of 27
Maphoto's blog has been described as "something of a digital literature phenomenon" (Santana 2018). Literary forms such as the Diary proliferate on social media and blogging as a genre of popular culture that asks us to rethink the ways African writing is being reconfigured by Web 2.0 platforms. Areas impacted include author-reader interactivity as well as the digitally enabled fluidity of these identities.
It invites us to appreciate anew how traditional authors use platforms, such as Facebook pages and profiles as alternative spaces for the articulation of creative expressions. In a conversation with Jeanette Chabalala of City Press, Maphoto explains that "readers have not stopped lapping it up and keep begging for more of the sex, drugs, lies and betrayal that fuel the story lines... What is fascinating is that parents contacted me and requested the blog to be turned into a book because they could not read it on their phones." (Chabalala 2013). That parents "requested the blog to be turned into a book" may be read along with the many responses to the fictional diary as demonstrating the spontaneous nature of interactions on social media, but it also raises a question of age and class since the reading space of the net could be tenuous for older people with limited access to the internet.
In another context, the request for book also recalls Ikhide Ikheloa's question about books in African writing: "how is Africa viewed everywhere, if not primarily through hard-copy books?" (2013). While it is productive to imagine Ikheloa's

The materiality of text
As the work of Karin Barber (2007) shows, African theories of textuality often invoke oral poetics, something that is relevant in the framework of the regeneration of meanings in literary texts both in print and digital realms. The major moments of textual representations in African knowledge productions includes the oral text best demonstrated by its context of performance, the printed text that emerged in the early twentieth-century Africa through the works of early publications, and finally, an electronic textuality of African literature that is gaining traction among scholars of what Walter Ong (1991)refers to as secondary orality. An expanded perspective of the text as any site of discourse, therefore, finds precedent in African oral frameworks that identify the text as a mutable entity produced by social and technological developments that affect its aesthetic and literary production and appreciation (Olorunyomi 2006, 137). In terms of digital texts, Shola Adenekan (2012)  That said, there are more significant bibliographical issues the textual critic might be interested in, including what this "movement of texts and writers across different mediums" means for literary interpretation. That seems to me to be pertinent for an appreciation of the material history of the African literary text today. His work highlights the emergence of online literary magazines which focused principally on the publication of short stories, essays and poems that appeal to a reading public that is equally online. Blogging and social media sites also give young African writers more platforms to publish works that did not exist previously outside of the computational space. Critical evaluations of such work must be mindful of the structure and materiality of their new medium. This seems to me a crucial point to emphasize as it points to what Mathew Kirschenbaum identifies elsewhere as first-generation objects. A "first generation electronic object," writes Kirschenbaum "is one that enjoys no material existence outside of the electronic environment of a computational file system-though this is not…to say that such objects enjoy no material existence at all" (2002,20). In relation to African literature, it is important to engage more conceptually with not just works that exist purely through the medium of the web but also the forms of textualities propelled by digital technologies, particularly in terms of their ontology and materiality. Texts, whether written, oral, or digitally transmitted, can help us understand the political contexts of their producers as well as the publics that emerge from and cohere around them. However, beyond questions of class and the political touchstones of texts online, the various formal changes that accrue from a digital-to-print move need to be foregrounded too. Significant emendations involving a wide range of accidentals and substantives are therefore usually present in the transformation from electronic formats to print texts. Adenekan explains that this process of textuality "involves reshaping the text for different formats, and in the process the creative piece is unfixed" (2012,13). This idea of an unfixed, sliding, and impermanent textuality that is obvious in the Saraba example is reiterated in the view that these digital texts may later appear in print.
The traditional obsession with "canonical texts has blocked our view of the real historical processes at work in the emergence and spread of literary forms" (Karin Barber 2007, 40). There is a sense here in which Barber's assertion calls for a study of genre and textuality that is wide and varied in its orientation. This view can inform an appreciation of the ways a book's production history, and its various editions  Hayles describes reading types in terms of a close reading that "correlates with deep attention" and a hyper reading that "includes skimming, scanning, fragmenting, and juxtaposing texts, and is "a strategic response to an information-intensive environment" we find ourselves in (2012,12). Hyper reading produces a cognitive

Conclusion
The need to examine how the impact of the physical properties of the text on the transmission of meaning has been the central idea of this work. To recast the title of Amy Earhart's book, the old is not just a mere trace in the new digital contexts of African online writing, it appears to be a desired condition. Despite a massive growth of digital publications in Africa, print culture not only remains solid as a major goal for writers who deploy digital technologies to circulate their works but also impels us to see how the reverse movement from digital to print create multiple texts with different physical features. The medium of the text of African literature in the present moment has to be understood beyond the print technology that continues to permeate digital discourses. When Shola Adenekan and Helen Cousins argue in their discussion of class and online African writing that "cybertexts are not permanent," and that "like orature, the meaning of cybertexts is unfixed and subject to multiple interpretations (2014, 11), they restate an assumption about the materiality of both print and electronic texts that needs to be highlighted: indeed, they praise impermanence, but this is only to the extent that it is the condition that makes the transition to print possible. Whether the medium is oral, print, or The interactive and connective logics of social media implicate these social arenas of literary networks and affinities as cultural terrains that consolidate interactive performances of writerly agency.